There's Really a Fire--Two Point Hospital Review

After 92 mostly enjoyable hours, I've finished building my dynasty of fabulous hospitals in Two Point Hospital.  I conquered an array of whacky, goofy diseases and managed my staff like a pro (that's definitely debatable).  Now that I've established myself as the "pointy mountain G.O.A.T" (45-stars!) I'm ready to weigh in on 2018's premiere hospital management sim.

Pros:
--As someone who played the original Theme Hospital from 1997, I enjoyed the fact that the game kept many of the gameplay and managerial features from the original, but still managed to add in new features to keep things fresh.  Many of the minor things that I found irritating in Theme Hospital were corrected and made better--for example, I always hated that you couldn't rotate or pan the camera, which was something that made placing items in rooms difficult.  Room design still follows the traditional grid system but has been improved by the ability to rotate rooms and the newly added copy/paste feature.

The Recurvery Room is used to treat patients afflicted with cubism.

--Tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.  Theme Hospital was definitely not about being a serious hospital management game and Two Point continues that tradition.  Diseases like turtle head (it's not what you think it is!), 8-Bitten, Grey Anatomy, and many silly others, give the game a light and humorous feel.  The machines used to treat these diseases are also flatout ridiculous--the turtle head machine uses a gyroscopic spinner and a giant suction cup to extract the patient's head from their body.

--Lots of gameplay.  I was very surprised by the fact that there were so many different hospitals.  For a game that sells for $34.99, I didn't expect to get anywhere close to 92 hours.  It's true that the number of hours you play could depend largely on how you play--if you chose to just earn one star and advance to the next hospital the game would be much shorter.  Having the option to choose to stay on a level and try for extra stars is a nice feature that provides flexibility for players.

--Different hospitals, different challenges.  Each hospital that you play has its own story and set of challenges.  One map is prone to outbreaks of epidemics which require you to be observant and vaccinate infected patients before too many escape and spread disease to the outside world.  Another map is a janitorial nightmare filled with flaming lava balls and machine wrecking earthquakes.

--Ability to micromanage or play freely.  I did a bit of both and found it enjoyable.  As an example, you can choose to assign your staff to certain tasks.  I used the heck out of this feature and made sure to assign tasks to staff members who had the best training for a certain task (like assigning my janitors with the highest mechanic skill to be the only ones to upgrade machines--especially at the third upgrade level where it can take for-freaking-ever to finally upgrade).  Other features, like being able to change the price of diagnostics and treatment, I didn't mess with.

Cons:
--Most hospitals are challenging in the beginning, but are much, much easier once you reach the two-star level.  One of the widest complaints I've read about the game is that some consider it to be too easy.  It really feels like once your staff is trained to a certain level (which does take awhile) that it's simply a matter of waiting to make it to the three-star level.  I think the game could be much improved by adding in new, more difficult challenges to reach that coveted third star.  There are definitely some challenging goals to reach (getting cure rate to 90% the first time can be tough and I really struggled with hygiene rate on one map).

--The goals for certain hospitals feel really poorly designed.  I was particularly irritated by the hospital at Pelican Wharf.  At that particular hospital there is an emphasis on technology and the goals revolve around cure rate, training staff in the research skill, and upgrading machines.  I wasn't too miffed by the cure rate goal, it's pretty standard, but the research skill requirement was just plain dumb--at the two star level you had to train 3 staff to level 3 research.  Why?  By that point in the game, since I had played the other hospitals to the three star level, I had very little research to complete.  It seemed like a waste of staff training slots to train that many staff in research.  It got even worse at the two and three star levels--two staff had to be trained in level 4 research and at the three star level, one staff member had to reach level 5!  I suppose that I could've just built a huge research room and popped in my crack research team, but it seemed like a waste.

The machine upgrade goal was another that became very irritating.  Even with building all diagnosis and treatment equipment AND upgrading it to the highest level, I was nowhere near to the 45 required machine upgrades.  My solution to this problem was completely inelegant--I built an extraneous general diagnosis room and upgraded the machine, then sold it, then repeated that about 10 times.  What a waste of money and janitorial time!

--More items needed.  Players earn "kudosh" for achieving certain goals in the game and can use that special currency to unlock new items that can be used throughout your hospital.  I had unlocked all the items by roughly the midpoint of the game and finished with 15,000 unspent kudosh.  I would like to see more items added and more ways for players to spend kudosh.

--I haven't experienced too many bugs, but there have been a few.  The good news is that the devs seem to be on top of getting things fixed and listening to player requests.

--The radio and music can get repetitive.  I enjoyed the different DJ's but got sick of the same 4-5 songs (which you can turn off).

Recommended for:
--Fans of Theme Hospital
--Players with a sense of humor that can verge on the cheesy and juvenile
--Players who want some management, but not an overwhelming amount

Not Recommended for:
--Players who want an extremely serious, deep management game about hospitals.